Getting the Final Girl Out of Get Out

Abstract

Get Out does not conform to the general expectations of horror films but instead plays with, inverts, and makes light of horror tropes. The slasher subgenre is a recognizable form that recurs in the public imaginary, but what we see in this film is repetition with a difference that reveals how recurring patterns can be reiterated in destabilizing ways. Here the “return of the repressed” is monstrous whiteness and white supremacy, which have been denied, or disavowed, in a “postracial” culture. When they return, they literally consume Black bodies, commandeering them for white use. Through this reading of Get Out, I intend to rethink the trope of the “Final Girl” as it is positioned within the slasher subgenre and to consider how that position not only provides context for current political moments but also shifts in the horror genre itself.

Keywords:

• Final Girl
• Get Out
• masculinity
• slasher films
• transcoding
• white supremacy

Notes

1 Palmer highlights Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s analysis of the ways that the Scream franchise recognizes slasher tropes that punish transgressive sexuality, prey on the bodies of women, and situate non-white characters as disposable—while failing to highlight that the films depend on Sidney, Scream’s white middle-class heroine.

2 See Kate Manne’s discussion of white women who voted for Trump here: “Recent Pew statistics show that white women who are married will have a white male partner in a very high proportion of cases—around 90 percent, and even higher than that in non-metropolitan areas. Now observe that white men in these areas are disproportionately likely not only to be Trump voters, but to have relative legal, social, and moral impunity to enforce norms of loyalty within intimate relationships, by means of threatening, controlling, and sometimes violent behavior. That makes a considerable proportion of white women subject to a system of powerful incentives and punishments, risks, and rewards, which can make it hard and costly to challenge or disagree with the white supremacist patriarchal status quo. Of course, that doesn’t excuse privileged white women’s complicity, but it does point out that white women are often both oppressed by white men and oppressors of more vulnerable women—those who are nonwhite, queer, trans, and/or disabled—among others” (Cleary; see also Cargle; Burton).

3 Author Casey Ryan Kelly notes the use of suburban landscapes in horror films: “The geography should be familiar to horror film audiences: the idyllic suburban enclave so frequently infiltrated by psychotic and supernatural killers in Hollywood features such as Disturbia (Caruso, 2007), Halloween (Carpenter & Hill, 1978), Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984), The Last House on the Left (Craven & Cunningham, 1972), Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2009), and Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982)” (234).

4 Shooting movement from right to left is a common technique used in horror films to signal that something bad is going to happen. This technique attempts to disorient the viewer by going against a Western reading from left to right. See Giannetti 14–18.

5 Unnatural light and oblique angles, or “Dutch Tilt shots,” attempt to create a sense of irresolution or visual anxiety and are often used in thrillers to disorient the viewer. See Giannetti 17.

6 Peele included the Asian character to comment on anti-blackness in other marginalized communities. See Truffaut-Wong.

7 We should understand these representations as a shift versus either “positive” or “negative.” See discussion of the limits of binary discussions of “positive” and “negative” representations by Gates.

8 Some have noted, for example, that Us (Dir. Peele, 2019)serves as a coninuation to many of these considerations, highlighting the need for the ongoing nature of these analyses.